Enterprise Mashup Summit

October 1, 2007

ABOUT ME

Hi, I am Gregor Hohpe, co-author of the book Enterprise Integration Patterns. I like to work on and write about asynchronous messaging systems, service-oriented architectures, and all sorts of
enterprise computing and architecture topics. I am also the Chief Architect at Allianz SE, one of the largest insurance companies in the world.

I attended the Enterprise Mashup Summit last Friday. It was a small-ish event, with
about 50 people attending. We saw about 10 presentations, mostly by vendors plus an
open forum. None of the presentations were too sales-ey, which gave the event a nice
workshop feel. Given the limited size, it would have been nice to have more time for
interaction. Here is a quick rundown of my impressions.

Buzz

Situational Applications

The word of the event was certainly situational application. I like the word and it even has a Wikipedia entry already: A situational application is software created for a small group of users with specific
needs. The application typically has a short life span, and is often created within
the group where it is used, sometimes by the users themselves. The best part about it is that you no longer have to say that you hacked something
together quickly. Rather, you built a situation application.

Copy-paste Developer

The "copy-paste developers" are coming out into the open. After a first copy-paste
generation built fancy JavaScript-enable web sites, the new generation can manage
to built actual Web applications. Copy-paste development is a key ingredient into
making the trend more viral – everyone can participate.

Creativity with Control

This IBM slogan highlights the dilemma corporate IT faces. Enabling end users to build
situational applications takes a lot of load off IT. On the other hand, without any
kind of governance a growing repertoire of these applications can become unmanageable.

Dave Nielsen, StrikeIron

Strikeiron acts as a marketplace for high-value web services, i.e. the ones a business
would want to pay for, such as sales tax computation, address correction, etc. StrikeIron
acts as a middleman between service provider and consumer, providing security, metering,
monetization, reporting, etc.

Dave summarized his view of Web 2.0 in three bullet points: more users, more savvy,
more willing. When the bubble burst, the valuable users did not go away, they just
became more savvy, meaning they wanted more sophisticated applications than a lot
of the dot-coms offered. As we have all seen, users are also much more willing to
contribute personal information etc. This underlines the view that mashups are more
of a social phenomenon, as opposed SOA being technical phenomenon. Dave illustrated
his point by comparing pre-bust matchmaker.com, which provided simple multiple-choice
profiles to match.com, which allowed freeform text and image sharing, to YouTube, which hosts more embarrassing videos than we'd like to imagine.

When asked about governance, Dave mentioned that he does not see many issues. Mashups
based on StrikeIron tend to be in departmental, not business critical applications.
In his view, the full fledged SaaS applications (SalesForce and friends) are leading
the way there by providing SLA etc. StrikeIron alleviates privacy concerns by assuring
customers that they do not store data. In general, they try to see to the business
directly as the IT sales cycle can be 6 months or longer.

Stefan Andreasen, Kapow

Stefan talked to his product suite, which can help scrape data off Web sites and make
it available as a feed or service. In this realm he distinguishes between horizontal data, which is easily available to everyone and vertical data, which is more personalized and more difficult to get at. He compared housingmaps.com
(horizontal) to a more targeted application that might provide school rating for families
with kids or bars for single people.

To Stefan, Mashups do not have to use JavaScript, Excel can be a great mashup platform.
The key ingredients to him are: RIA + Do-it-yourself + Scripting + Content. He compared
Mashups with traditional applications in a similar way as we did at Mashup Camp:

Kapow currently sells their software into the enterprise as investment towards future
mashups. Sample applications include reputation management (e.g., checking blogs for
mentions of your company) or competitive intelligence (e.g., check competitors' prices
or monitor retailers' "out of stock" situations to estimate how well an item is selling).
The obvious questions for Stefan were the robustness of the scraping approach and
the quality of the data. In his view, the business value of data is higher than the
cost of having to rewrite your application every once in a while, making it viable
to work with a solution that is a little brittle. Inside the enterprise application
changes can be managed more easily, making the scraping approach more viable.

The second major question relates to legality and end user agreements. In my view,
sites who like to share their data typically provide web services and / or feeds already,
while sites who do not share their data as a feed typically issue end user agreements
that prohibit users from scraping and repurposing the data. Stefan has obviously heard
this question before. One response is the "guns don't kill people" attitude, even
though we learned from the Digital Millennium Act that in the eyes of the government
"Software, not people, cracks code." Taking another point of view, these tools simply
automate tasks that companies already execute manually, e.g. by having someone copy
and paste competitor's prices off their sites. The most convincing scenario is probably
company internal use, where such concerns do not arise.

Patrick Chanezon, Google

Patrick gave a nice overview of Google's offerings for the enterprise market. Google is becoming an increasingly important platform player, Google Apps being the most visible offering. Apps is complemented by a set of APIs, some of which
are available specifically to enterprise customers, such as Google Maps for Enterprise. Patrick also pointed out it's easier to use effectively more recent products, such
as Google Gears, inside an enterprise, where a consistent software image can be deployed
to all users. In true Web 2.0 spirit, Patrick shared his slides and demo material
on del.icio.us.

Oren Michels, Mashery

Oren spoke from a vendor who actually makes money in the mashup space. Mashery markets
primarily to companies who own high value data but have relatively little traffic
to their Web site. Mashery proposition is to make it fast and safe to expose offerings
as public web services. For example, domaintools.com's API traffic is a multiple of the site traffic. Oren mentioned a photo web site
that does not currently offer an API and apparently receives 100 requests a day (!)
to provide one. Mashery runs its servers on Amazon's EC2.

Sriram Padmanabhan, Lauren Cooney, IBM

Sriram and Lauren shared IBM's Info 2.0 vision: discover, transform, feeds, mashup.
They underlined the fact that enterprise applications and situational applications
complement each other. IBM play in the space consists of three elements: Mashup Hub
for discovery, DAMIA for data processing, and QED Wiki to assemble mashups. More at
Lauren's blog.

At the core of JackBe's mashup server is an XML scripting language, which allows developers
to define "services". These services can be composed into larger services through
micro-orchestrations.

Panel

The event completed with a panel, which was more of an open discussion. This part
was very interesting -- I wish we had more time for this type of interaction. I wish
I had taken better notes. For now I have only the questions:

What tools are available, especially to feed data back into the system (i.e. not read-only)?

Application lifecycle management?

What implementation tools are available?

How do solutions move from the situational/mashup to controlled/enterprise?

Do fat client applications have a place or is it all in the cloud?

Data security?

How to get flexibility while ensuring data quality?

Who will be the first CTO who recognizes that opening API's is a good thing?

What is driving the need?

How do you make money with this?

The buzz around Web 2.0 can be heard quite clearly in the Bay Area. This weekend we
have the Community Next event, followed next week by the The Business of APIs event and the Web 2.0 Summit. It's become difficult to keep track of all the events in the area. Luckily, Web
2.0 application like Upcoming or Facebook help us manage.

Gregor is the Chief IT Architect of Allianz SE. He is a frequent speaker on asynchronous
messaging and service-oriented architectures and co-authored Enterprise Integration Patterns (Addison-Wesley). His mission is to make integration and distributed system development
easier by harvesting common patterns and best practices from many different technologies.www.eaipatterns.com